Clarissa
by Gloria Patri
Summary: You sit in your room, you turn on the TV, and from the corner of your eye you see the shadows closing in on you. Look again and the world has disappeared. Your world, it's gone. Forever. OFC.


**Clarissa  
**a Supernatural fanfiction  
by Fye Kurokawa

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**Author's Note: **Please read in 3/4!! Not only does it look more novel-ish, but it's a lot less painful to read. And it looks longer. ;D  
This is a test drive. This is the first Supernatural fanfic I want to take up a notch; I want to try and write multiple chapters for this. So please, **read** and **review** if you want to see more of this!

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It was never anything particularly striking that caught her attention. Whenever she would go on one of her "expeditions", it was never on something big and flagrant that everyone could easily pick up on. They were always cases, files she would metiuclously put together in an attempt to both fulfill her messiah complex and spend her time with something other than videogames.  
It started as someting completely harmless and banale; it was something she'd put together in three days for the heck of it. She had "investigated" someting rather awkward near her college and, next thing she knew, one thing led to another and she was faced with something that put into perspective everything that she'd been told about the world. The very exsitence of God had been rendered actually very plausible just by that one experience. She was alone the day it happened--because, yes, it happened in broad daylight. It had been something of an unexpected encounter you can imagine, and it had scared her to a point where she'd spent a full week not going to school and locking herself up in her room. Parents, friends, even distant relatives were worried about her. She refused to speak to her three closest friends. She didn't go on the internet, never recharged her phone. She spent an entire week without any communication with the outside world. She emmerged from that room looking exactly as she had the week before, but something was different. It was underneath her skin and coursing through her vains like a poisonous infection that would kill her as slowly as humanly possibe.

She was different. Something in her brain had clicked and exploded and unleashed something in her mind she thought would be impossible to feel. There was something in the very core of her being that had changed, something that had altered her DNA so much that she didn't even feel human anymore. She wasn't just someONE different, she was someTHING different, altogether.

It wasn't until she went back to school, two weeks and a half after that encounter, that she began to realise just how much she had changed.

Migraines became something regular and barely incapacitating. Thoughts came in a multitude of incomprehensible languages and writing was hard because of it. She would try to write in english--she would speak the words out loud to make sure she was actually using the right language--but the words on the page became signs and symbols that no one else recognised or bothered to understand. As time went by, other strange occurences became regular happenings: rather long visions in broad daylight, premonitory dreams every other night.  
The one thing that ever got to her was her curse. That curse of empathy, the ability to feel every other emotion aside from her own.

It was amusing at first, being in the throes of true love and feeling all the affection between couples. And the genuine curiosity in most of her classes had been contagious. But as days progressed, those delicated emotions were always overpowered by something horrible and dark. Resentment, longing for someone out of their reach, pain, confusion.

The pain was always the worst part.

It hadn't been so bad before the hypnotism. She'd always figured that was what had awakened her, so to speak. Before meeting that man--he didn't know anything about what had happened to her and yet still chose her as a test subject--she had been able to cast aside negative emotions and still lead a moderately normal life. But after seeing him, looking into his eyes and seeing what was there… There was no going back.

When others had been ordered to liberate their worst fears, that was what had struck her like a knife. She was fine and out of hypnotism, she knew that. But something was horribly wrong with the entire scenario. The screaming and the anxious, glazed-over eyes; there was something unnatural and unhealthy about it. The instant that girl started screaming, she, herself, began to scream. She couldn't remember how or why, but she had somehow wound up on the floor, begging for him to stop it, to stop the fear and the pain so that they could finally be in peace.  
It hadn't been easy for her to recover from that. She stayed out of school for three days before being able to be in a crowd again, in class or otherwise. Since that hypnotist had walked through the school, her mind was constantly overrun by everything. It was sensory overload all over again. All the voices felt louder, the lights seemed too bright and her clothes were too rough on her skin.

The first time she decided to do something about it was quite possibly the single best day of emotional and psychological rest she'd had in a long time.

She had called a friend of hers, someone close that she knew would listen to her. She's warned him that what she was about to tell him wasn't exactly something a sane person would ever admit to, but she told him he was the only person she could turn to at that point. Actually--she said it later--he was one of the few she could turn to, but she couldn't really reach the others.  
She told him everything that happened after the encounter. She was careful to leave the latter outside of her tale, knowing that it would be far too much for him to absorb in one sitting. She was already more than elated that he was taking her story so well in the first place, she figured she shouldn't push her luck just because she was happy.  
He took the information well. He offered her a helping hand and told her he had a few connections that would be able to help her cope. Cope with all the negative emotions and the monsterous toll it took on her. She gladly accepted the offer and a week later they were on a road trip. She had told her parents that she was spending a week at a friend's house. She reassured them: she would still make it to her classes and catch up on all the work she had missed. And that's how she left off on a two and a half week trip into the confines of the middle of nowhere to meet up with a tribe of native americans.

It was research and mostly college-like work at first. Finding out everything she could about witches, hunters, demons, anything fantastic and, literally, out of this world. The stories she heard were things she had nightmares and more than awkward dreams about. She took naps several time a day despite knowing that she would have horrific nightmares. They were always somewhat the same though; horrible creatures coming after her, but she would never die. She would always somehow climb out of the worst situation victorious.  
She knew this--she knew that the nightmares would come and that they would end in something of a not so horrible way--but she couldn't keep away from it. She ran after the legends and stories like they were the syringe she'd forgotten on the floor.

It was one night, the night before Michael dragged her out of that reserve. That's when she saw it again. It was unlike anything she'd ever seen. It wasn't anything close to being a nightmare, but it was still like a dream she was waiting to wake up from.  
She was walking down the road coming back from one of the elder's place. She'd picked up on several new tidbits of information that came to complete that which she already had. The sun had begun to set and the sky was darkening slowly, but surely, off in the distance. It was whlie she was skipping down a sidewalk that she saw it again. She froze--it felt like time itself had run into a phase of stagnation--and she just stared at it.

A woman in a stark-white dress that was flowing in the wind that wasn't evening blowing that evening. Long, curly, pale violet hair that can't be human but that actually looked natural on that woman. She couldn't have been any older than thirty years old, though there was something incredibly off about her.  
She stared at her, wide, pale-blue eyes glued to the girl who'd nearly fallen face-first on the pavement. The smile was so sweet it was too easy to tell that it was fake.

"Hi there, Andraea. Long time no see."

The honey-like voice wasn't enough to convince her of the woman's good intentions. She was there the day of the hypnotism, she was there the day of the fifteen minute-long vision and in the backseat of the car the night Michael drove down to the reserve.

"You're not her." She whispered. It was more of a hiss; a venom-coated hiss. "You're not the one who looked over me."

"But I was always there, wasn't I? During your little moments of awakening." The woman smiled and took a few steps forward, each matched with a step Andraea took backwards.

"You were there to make my life hell. It's your fault I'm like this you--"

"Bitch? Oh, honey, that's no way to talk to someone who can kill you that easily." The woman tilted her head to the side, the same, too-sweet smile plastered on her face. "Come on, Andy. Let's go home. Ditch Michael and this crappy town."

Andraea seemed to hesitate for a moment. She'd been whining the last couple of days about how badly she wanted to go home. Several times in the past few nights she woke up in cold sweats, itching to run to Mike's car and just drive away and put that town in the rearview mirror as fast as humanly possible. How she had managed to resist the temptation of it was beyond her--she just knew she couldn't leave Michael behind for the life of her.

"You're not Anna."

In a gesture that could only later on be defined as reflexive, she wrenched the cross from her neck and threw it with such brute force that it actually did, by a milimeter or two, embed itself in the woman's forehead. The split second of surprise was what she'd used to turn around and run as fast as she could. Didn't look behind once to see what had happened to the woman, and she honestly couldn't have cared any less.  
She ran even after her lungs felt like they had turned to ash and even despite the fact that her legs were just about ready to cave in under her. For a second after she'd started running, she heard a shriek--something she know couldn't be human. It sounded like a wounded harpie with a severe throat infection, and it really wasn't soft on the ears. For a while when she had begun to run he had been forced to cover her ears to try to bock out the sound. It hadn't been useful in the least; she could still feel the light trickle of blood slowly crawling down the side of her face.

Thankfully, the house she and Michael had been staying at hadn't been that far away. When she ran inside she slammed the door and ran up the stairs to the guest room they were sharing. Mike was comfortably installed on the bed leafing through a rather old and tattered book. Immediately, Andraea started packing her things. Michael got up and forced her to stop and breathe and tell her what had happened.

"I saw it, Mike. I saw th-the-the, man, dude, fuck, I don't know what it is." Andraea tried to speak in coherent sentences but nothing would come out quite right. She was out of breath and nearly hyperventilating and Michael had to make her sit down before she toppled over.

Mike made her carefully run through the gist of what had went down a few blocks up the road and, as soon as he decided Andraea was going to survive her exhaustion, he started packing everything they needed.

"We're staying for the night, but we're leaving first thing in the morning. Whatever's here isn't dangerous enough for us to investigate, but I don't want you to be compromised. Sound good to you?"

The last night Andraea and Michael spent in the Demers household was clearly the most stressful night the former had ever known in her life. While Michael was able to get at least two or three hours of sleep, Andraea had barely been able to close her eyes without having a panic attack. Around two in the morning she'd gotten up to pull the curtains together and had nearly jumped out of her skin. There she was, the woman with the surreal hair and skin paler than a vampire's.

Six in the morning, Andy and Mike had hightailed it out of the country house faster than than their wits could collect themselves. Andraea let Michael drive and didn't care how high above the speed limit he was driving. She looked straight ahead of her and kept her eyes focused on the gravel road leading outside the village. She focused on the dimly-lit world of a rising sun, on the fog covering the ground. Mike drove as long as he could, and when his leg grew numb, Andraea took the wheel. Neither of them spoke. The radio was off, the care was quiet save for the air rushing through the open windows.  
When Andy finally parked the car in front if her house, several hours later, she turned off the enging and sat there. Her skin felt like it was crawling and Michael didn't look any better than she felt. They gave twin stares at the windshield for a long time. Eventually the front door opened and Andraea's mother came out screaming and pleading for them to come out.  
Andy climbed out of the driver's seat and closed the doorm. She stood by the car for a moment. She just stood there and looked at the ground. Her mother had quieted, while her brother and father ran outside to stand by the former.

Andraea walked around the car and went straight for the front door. Her parents tried talking to her--screamed as loud as they could allow themselves--but it was as though she couldn't hear them. She'd locked herself in her mind and was set to ignore everything around her. Even when Michael jogged up to her in front of the door, all she could do was look at him and hope he'd understand. Mike carefully walked away and Andraea made her way to her room. As soon as she closed the door she shoved her bookcase in front of the door and let the bedsheet cover her window. Just as her clothes then lay in a pile on the floor, Andy'd let herself crumble in her bed, a heap of confusion and fear and doubt and panic. In her bout of panic, she'd grabbed her phone, a pen and her trust old dog-eared notebook. She kept her cellphone close after she'd sent a message to Michael. She told him she'd gone into one of those states again where she was stuck in a dream-like stasis. She told him she'd write everything down and that, don't worry, it won't end up like last time.

Andraea's body shook only mildly as her hand wove the letters together furiously, as though her hand was becoming an entity seperate from her body. Her entire body was racked with shudders she couldn't even dream of stopping. She tried to focus on the words but while time passed by agonizingly slowly, her eyes seemed to take on a mind of their own. She couldn't keep herself concentrated for more than five seconds at a time. Eventually, she just collapsed on her bed and tried to keep herself conscious. Her eyes continuously kept drooping and her breath steadied herself even though she had been hyperventilating hardly two minutes before. Her heart had slowed considerably and only listening to her own pulse had begun to lull her into a dream she didn't want to have.

Her dreams were many and none of them were related to each other--in the beginning. The first dream was just on her her in bed and suddenly looking up, finding the sun had set and the moon had risen. The second dream was of her being possessed and jumping from the third floor of her friend's appartment. The third dream was of her mother stnading on the front lawn--of all her neighbors standing on their front lawns--looking at her, while she stood, scared and frozen stiff, in the middle of the living room. The fourth dream confused her more than anything else. She was waking up in her bed, laid out exactly as she had been when she'd fallen asleep. Her room felt similar enough, but something felt off, something felt wrong. She pinched herself, felt nothing, and frowned. She screwed her eyes shut for several seconds and opened them again. That usually sufficed to wake herself up. But she opened her eyes again, still stuck in a dream she wasn't sure she wanted to see the end of.  
Deciding to humour herself, Andy sat up and looked around her room. Even the air felt still, disgunstingly stagnant and stuffy. The dust particles in the hair held an almost-glow where the sun streamed through the window.

The blinds, the curtain. Those weren't open and pulled apart when she'd gone to sleep. Hell, her room hadn't been that bright several seconds ago. How hadn't she noticed the change? Andraea slowly inched towards the window, cracked open a tad just as she always had it. She reached for the bunched, pulled-up bedsheet she used as a curtain and let her hand rest on her cold window.

"I didn't expect to see you here so soon."

Andy didn't turn around when the man spoke. It was a voice she felt was familiar, right down to the core of her being. But, of course, she had never heard him speak before, and was fairly certain she'd never so much as seen him on the street before in her life. It was something of a gut instinct. She smiled to herself, unsure why, and let her hand drop down to her side. A hand crawled down her arm. The heat of it was just short of unbearable.

"For a dream, this pain feels a hell of a lot like something real."

Andraea woke up with a start, orange and purple flames consuming her vision for a split second before her room came into view. Her breathing was hard and laboured for a moment. After several deep breaths, her heart rate had slowed enough for her to swing her legs over the side of her bed and rest her head in her hands.  
She found morning two hours later when she was forced to get up to shut off her alarm. She'd stayed sitting for about half an hour before laying down trying to get a little more sleep before sun-up. Andy cracked open her closet door, grabbed the first pair of jeans and the first shirt she could get her hands on and got dressed. The weather outside was decent. The clouds were rolling out, the air was crisp and the sun was just coming up over the horizon. Carefully, trying to make as little sound as possible, Andraea cleared her door, slowly made her way down the hallway, slipped into her shoes and practically ran out the back door.

Andy flew down the back proch stairs, grabbed her bike on the go, barely took the time to open and close the fench and she was off. She ran a bit down the obnoxiously long driveway before jumping up on her bike and zooming off. It was hardly half after six in the morning, but it wasn't quite like she cared. She rode down the street, took a left to the boulevard, went uphill to the river and followed it down to the bridge. Something in her pocket vibrated at that point; she hooked a left and stopped in a field. The pulled out her half-alive cellphone, puzzled as to why it was in that particular pair of pants. Mike's number flashed on the small square screen while Eye of the Tiger rang throughout the small field. Andy flipped the phone open and answered rather angrily.

"Holy hell you're actually up!" Mike yelled, obviously awe-struck.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm up. I'm halfway to school actually." Mike gave an impressed whistle. "What's wrong?"

"Um, well…" Andraea frowned. He usually wasn't hesitant to tell her something, no matter how odd or embarassing it was. "I'm, uh, I'm sort of in front of your window right now boy this is awkward."

She couldn't help it; Andy let out a bark of laughter and let herself fall over in the tall grass. She laughed for a good minute and a half before Mike's annoyed voice told her to get the hell over it and get her ass home. She smiled and obliged, not before telling him off about his horrible language. ("I can't believe you kiss your mother with that mouth!" she said.)

Twenty minutes later found both Andraea and Michael sitting on her front lawn, each with a cup of Tim Horton's coffee in hand. It had been a pain to carry the tray of two coffees down the road, but she'd somehow managed it. Andy had insisted on staying outside to drink--they were sure to wake up her parents if they went inside. And the last thing she wanted was a confrontation with her parents. Again.  
After her little non-fit the evening before, she highly doubted that any conversation would end well. Andraea's mother would probably understand, the woman usually did. Her father and brother were two entirely different issues. They would snap and continuously push and shove for answers no matter how desperately she'd try to ask them to back off. Her mother could only be so convincing.

"What are you gonna do now?" Mike asked, breaking the three minute-long silence that had slipped between the two teens. "I don't think this is the end of it."

"I'unno." Andraea shrugged, taking a large gulp of her french vanilla coffee. "I haven't seen her in two days. Doesn't look like she followed me."

"I had a dream last night."

Andy jerked her head to the left and looked at Michael as though he'd grown a second head. He usually tended to pass a comment that was more of less called for, but to just blurt something out like that wasn't exactly somethign he did often.  
Unless it really, really bugged him.

"What… what kind of dream are we talking about here?" Andraea asked anxiously, not quite sure she wanted to know the answer to that one.

"The kind you wake up in a start and check yourself for injuries and actually find one." He muttered, and Andy had to strain herself to catch the last few words. Instinctively, she jerked his shirt'S right sleeve up.

Her nearly finished cup of coffee rolled down the small hill on the front lawn, its contents well gone by the time it reached the small walkway at the bottom. Andraea had jumped back, her right hand automatically flying to the cross at her neck.

"You're fucking kidding me. This isn't cool Mike, this really isn't cool."

"You think I'm doing this to freak you out Andy?" Mike whispered harshly, pulling his shirt's sleeve down and looking at the cardboard cup roll down the small hill. "I'm scared shitless right now. I thought you could give like, y'know, support. Apparently that was a lot to ask."

Andraea stared at him wide-eyed, here eyes regularly flitting from his face to his arm. Her hand slowly came down as she sat next to Michael again. She carefully wrapped her arms around Mike's right one, and held on as tightly as she could muster, so early in the morning. The fog still clung to the streets and most of the neighboring yards. The sun was rising, slowly but surely, basking everything in something of an ethereal glow.

"What's happening to us?" she whispered, burrying her face into Michael's arm.

"I wish I knew, Andy. I seriously which I knew." he answered quietly, slowly running a hand through Andraea's hair.

Roughly an hour later, in the same silence that they'd left each other in beforehand, Michael took Andraea back to his appartment, conveniently located half an hour from her own home. She'd called her brother and left a message on his phone, and sent a text message to her parents.

_Hey mom, dad._

_You always told me that I was different. That some of the things I did, some of the things that happened to me, they weren't normal, and that I should look into it. Well, I looked into it. And I didn't like what I found. I'm staying at Mike's place for a couple days. We're going on another field trip._

_I'm finally looking into this, mom.  
I'm finally getting the answers you wanted me to get._

"We're gonna need guns." was the first thing Michael said the moment they stepped into his appartment. Andy had giggled a bit, albeit only lightly. But that was enough for Mike; seeing her smile was a good sign in and of itself.

"Yeah, you're probably right." she'd answered, patting him on the shoulder.

As the day went by, Andraea found herself sleeping more than she did doing anything else. There wasn't much to do; the shock of whatever had happened earlier in the morning had been enough action than the both of them could handle in a lifetime. And so while Mike occupied himself doing the dishes, vaccuming the carpet in the living room, Andy mostly stuck to watching the news, reading whatever horror novel Michael had left lying around and sleeping.  
She figured she'd never slept so much in just one day. There were days when she'd sleep in until three in the afternoon, but those days, she'd gone to bed around four in the morning. Her sleeping was justified, then. But she's woken up early, had gone to bed early, but had still only gotten a handful of waking, active hours in the day. Michael tried to reason with her; maybe her body was aching to have another one of those ESP dreams. But she quickly and easily countered by saying that the woman could show up in her dream at any given moment.

"Still no creepy demonic angel thing?" Michael asked as he stepped into his bedroom--which Andraea had claimed for the day--with a cup of coffee. She didn't refuse it; she needed a nice jolt of caffeine to get her up and running again, before the sun set.

"Not yet." Andy confirmed, taking a sip of the actually not-that-hot beverage. She put the mug on the nightstand next to the bed and brought her legs closer to her. Mike sat down at the end of the bed and frowned. "Actually I… there's this dream I had last night." she confessed, finally admitting to what had been bugging her all day.

First, she ran a hand down Michael's arm. She saw him shiver; her hand were ice-cold and his skin was, as per usual, practically sorching hot. The handprint there was so clear and defined that it may as well have been scarring done ages ago.

Then, slowly, she lifted the right sleeve of the hoodie she had been wearing all day.

"It--I don't know, Mike. I don't know. I'm scared." Andy whispered, extending her arm for the former to take in his hands.

Mike ran his fingers through the handprint identical to his own, frowning when he saw how silvery-white it was compared to his own purplish scar. It seemed at though it was a severe burn mark she'd gotten when she was little, something that stretched and expanded over the years. Whilst Andy's looked old and taken care of, Mike's handprint looked as though it had been part of some brutal, bloody ritual. And so although it seemed old enough, it also seemed fresh, like it had been made only a month ago.

"Why did you--?"

"I'm scared. I'm-I'm so scared Mike." Andraea sobbed, throwing her arms around Michael's neck. And she cried. She cried long and hard until she fell asleep.

But her luck couldn't last forever.

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_Thanks so much for taking the time to read! This is only a test chapter, sort of like a pilot episode. Please leave a review! I love to hear what you guys have to say, all the time. :)_


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